There’s a good chance you didn’t watch EastEnders last night. This might be because it was a warm evening, or because you were bingeing something on Netflix, or maybe because your life is tough enough as it is without having to devote several hours a week to watching a programme about miserable people shuffling around with expressions like they’ve just all been involuntarily forced to watch an autoplay marathon of YouTube vivisection supercuts.

But if you did miss it, there’s probably no point catching up now. Because there’s already a much better, and much shorter, version of last night’s EastEnders. It’s that speech that Donald Trump gave about Britain a couple of weeks ago. You remember the one. The one he gave to the NRA.

Remember it? The one where he said that central London hospitals looked like blood-covered military war zones because of all the knife crime. Remember? The one where he ended up cooing the word ‘knives’ three times in a row while absent-mindedly stabbing at the air to the delight of the assembled rednecks. That speech was last night’s EastEnders in essence, only slightly more convincing.

Like a Christmas episode

Everything about last night’s EastEnders had the air of an event. Like a Christmas episode, it was a big ensemble piece that saw everyone crammed into the pub at the same time. As with World Cups and the Olympics, it had characters commenting on real-life events that had only just happened. And, like probably every third episode of EastEnders, it ended up with two boys being graphically stabbed in an alleyway while a crowd of drunks in the background simultaneously chanted versions of Land of Hope and Glory and Three Lions at each other.

The stabbing, clearly, was the main event here. Keegan Baker stole a bike so he could rush home and watch the royal wedding. But he stole it from a gang, so the gang followed him home, stabbed both him and his best friend Shakil and left them to bleed out on the floor. At least one of them will die from their wounds, which will apparently lead to the singularly uncomfortable sight of Bonnie Langford attempting suicide next week.

It’s clear why EastEnders has attempted this. Although nowhere near as rife as Trump made out, there has been a spate of knife-related deaths in London – 37 so far this year and counting – and EastEnders often makes a point of drawing attention to social issues like these. It was progressive and upfront about AIDS, for example, and it featured a same-sex kiss years before anybody else dared to do the same.

Ugly, knee-jerk episode

But something about last night’s stabbing felt a little off. It just didn’t feel particularly earned. There was such minimal foreshadowing that, when it actually happened, it felt less like the epic state-of-the-nation tragedy it should have been, and more like something that was scribbled down at the last minute to reduce the programme’s salary budget.

Also, it didn’t help that the whole thing was offset against the royal wedding, with a crowd of drunk regulars all hooting vague platitudes about Meghan Markle. Presumably EastEnders was trying to make the point that baubles like the wedding distract us from our real-life problems. But if that was the case, the execution was botched. EastEnders has never been great at shoehorning in last-minute inserts that reflect big events – anyone who watched Minty and Gary stutter their way through a panic-written scene about a goalless England World Cup match that had only just finished will know this only too well – but, even by these standards, last night was an ill fit.

Hopefully this was just the start of a storyline – if Langford rumours are true, then EastEnders is going to be unflinching in its portrayal of the aftermath – that will hopefully redeem the episode. But you can only redeem something if people actually stick around for it. On the basis of last night’s ugly, tawdry, knee-jerk of an episode, I’m going to take my chances and skip out.

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